It Might Lead Anywhere

by E. R. Punshon

  To Bobby’s story of the gold hidden under the cottage bedroom floor, and of the will leaving it all to Mr. Goodman, Olive listened intently.

  “If Mr. Goodman knew of the will,” she remarked, “and knew everything was left to him, that would explain a good deal, wouldn’t it? Because then he would have a reason for the murder and yet he needn’t do anything about the gold. He could simply leave it where it was.”

  But Bobby shook his head.

  “Goodman didn’t know,” he asserted positively. “That’s as certain as can be. He was completely bowled over. A shock and not a pleasant one either. He didn’t want it and he didn’t like having it. Why?”

  “Are you sure?” asked Olive doubtfully. “You can’t imagine anyone not wanting all that gold. At least, I can’t.”

  “There might be reasons,” Bobby said. “He’s very much the country gentleman now and perhaps he didn’t like the idea of his name being mixed up with a murder case. Another thing. A curious thing. He was scared. I mean before we got there, before he knew about the will. He was badly scared of someone or something. Who? Why?”

  “Was anyone there?”

  “We saw no one except Miss Foote. There’s a cook.”

  “Good gracious,” said Olive, absolutely thunderstruck. “Are you sure? A cook? Well, anyhow, it can’t be the cook, can it? Unless she’s just given notice; and then he would have told you, and besides a man never minds about a cook till she isn’t there. And I suppose it couldn’t be Miss Foote?”

  “Why not?” asked Bobby thoughtfully, as absent-mindedly he nearly gave himself a second helping of dried salt cod, only he remembered just in time. “I’m not too happy about that young woman,” he said. “She had old Spencer where she wanted him all right. But all the time she was flirting her hardest with him, she was giving me the glad eye. Spencer wasn’t too pleased. Well, why did she?”

  “I simply can’t imagine,” said Olive, wrinkling her brow. “You wouldn’t think any girl would want to, would you?”

  Bobby looked at her suspiciously but decided it might be wiser to ask no explanation. Instead, he said:

  “Either she lied about seeing the Jebb girl where she said she did, or else the Jebb girl lied in saying she wasn’t there. Why?”

  “Seems,” observed Olive, “as if you can’t simply say anything but ‘why?’”

  “Well, it’s all one big interrogation mark at present,” Bobby defended himself. “Of course, Miss Foote may have lied because she felt she had been nosey and was going to get told off and so invented a yarn about someone else being nosier still.”

  “It might be that,” Olive agreed. “Only why did she say it was Miss Jebb?”

  “That wants explaining,” agreed Bobby in his turn. “Was Miss Foote trying to direct suspicion towards her? If it was that, well, then, obviously Miss Foote knows something.”

  “Do you mean that brings her in as a suspect herself?”

  “Clearly. She turns up as a kind of combined secretary-housekeeper to Goodman who turns out to be the dead man’s previous employer and now his heir. She has been seen in the company of one of two young men who also have turned up recently. She showed interest in the scene of the murder and then accused another girl of showing even more. Did her story that Miss Jebb was trying to get into the cottage mean that that was what was in her own mind? She flirted her hardest with old Spencer—my word, if he heard me say that, I would be out and the Yard would be in to-morrow, expense or none. But all the time she was flirting with him, she was giving me the glad eye. As if Spencer were just the stooge and I was the main objective. Of course,” added Bobby, straightening his tie, pulling down his waistcoat, brushing away imaginary crumbs from his coat, “of course, she may be simply the sort of girl who just naturally falls for any fine, upstanding, good-looking young fellow she happens to see.”

  “What? What was that?” asked Olive, thunderstruck again. “What? Do you mind saying that last bit again?”

  “Any fine, upstanding, good-looking young fellow she happens to see,” repeated Bobby firmly. “Naming no names, of course, but there it is.”

  “If,” said Olive, a little wildly, “you are trying to hint—”

  “Hint nothing,” interrupted Bobby. “I merely state facts.” He added, more seriously: “Was it me, as me, she was aiming at, or me, as policeman? If the first: O.K. If the second: Why? Is Miss Foote simply an empty-headed frivolous little fool of a flirt or is she something very different?”

  “Any woman,” said Olive, and now she was beginning to look a little uneasy, “any woman who can pretend to be a frivolous little fool of a flirt when she isn’t—needs watching.”

  “You’re telling me,” said Bobby, who had recently spent a few evenings at the cinema in order to study and learn the American language. “Then there’s Miss Jebb. If it’s true she was trying to get into the cottage —and someone certainly was, for I distinctly saw the back door latch lifted—then again: Why?”

  “I’m beginning to think,” Olive said, “I’ve married a gramophone which can only play one disc that says nothing but ‘Why?’”

  “It’s how I feel,” Bobby explained. “All one enormous ‘Why?’ Also it happens that Kayes, one of the two unexpected young men recently arriving in Oldfordham, lodges with Miss Jebb’s mother. Rather a slender connecting thread but thin and slender threads may give strong leads.”

  “Only,” Olive pointed out, “because you’re assuming that there is something to be connected. Mr. Kayes may have nothing whatever to do with it.”

  “Why has he chosen a little country town like Oldfordham to spend his leave in? Is it only coincidence that he arrives shortly before the murder? He was at the Chipping Up disturbance and he gave me the idea even then that he knew something about Brown. We found his card in Brown’s cottage, as well as Mr. Childs’s. He said something about it being a complete washout if Brown was dead. Well, now he is. What’s been washed out?”

  “It’s all pretty vague, isn’t it?” Olive said doubtfully. “He is spending his leave at Oldfordham and he has to spend it somewhere. He happened to be at Chipping Up and so were other people—Mr. Childs, for instance, and you don’t suspect him. He is lodging with Miss Jebb’s mother, and another girl you don’t much trust said something you don’t much believe about Miss Jebb. And all that,” said Olive with determination, “isn’t a thread, isn’t a bit of tacking even.”

  “Even a bit of tacking is better than nothing,” Bobby told her, though with no great optimism. “There’s one other thing to remember. There’s something very like a family resemblance between these two young men—Mrs. Jebb’s lodger and the one reported seen in Miss Foote’s company.”

  “Wait a moment,” Olive complained. “You go round and round in a circle. Whenever you say anything about anybody, you always go on to someone else till I don’t know where I am.”

  “Exactly,” Bobby agreed. “That’s just it, and if it’s all chance and nothing more, then all I can say is that chance has been working overtime and then some. The Miss Foote young man’s explanation is that he means to start a guest house and he’s looking for a suitable place. Quite plausible. Pretty country round here. Wychwood knocks out the New Forest any day. Only when two young men, with what seems a family likeness to each other, turn up in a small country town and immediately afterwards there’s a murder, you have to—well, you start thinking, don t you?”

  “If you can call it thinking,” Olive said gloomily, “when all you’re doing is going round and round in a fog, wondering where you are.”

  “Oh, I call it thinking all right,” Bobby declared, “and one thing I can’t help thinking—or noticing—is that religion seems mixed up in it as well as the gold Brown had tucked away. Duke Dell seemed to think it a pity Brown hadn’t drowned in good earnest at Chipping Up, all for the safety of his soul as far as one can make out. Duke Dell has no alibi and when a man has seen what he calls a Vision, he passes out of the normal. Every living soul is unaccou
ntable, unpredictable, unexpectable, if there is such a word. When you think you’ve see a Vision, a whole lot more so. The Visionary lives in another world than ours. People have often burnt each other alive for the good of each other’s souls, so what’s the matter with knocking you on the head for the same good reason? Duke Dell thought Brown a backslider, and that’s one way of dealing with backsliders. Brown, according to Goodman, was always susceptible to religious emotion, even if only in the odd shape of believing Jesuits the cause and origin of all evil. And we know he had been making a nuisance of himself to Mr. Childs at St. Barnabas.”

  “Well, that can’t have anything to do with it,” declared Olive with conviction.

  “Oh no,” agreed Bobby, though with less conviction, and Olive looked at him sharply.

  “What do you mean?” Olive asked. “Mr. Childs is the most unlikely person of all unlikely persons, isn’t he?”

  “So he is,” Bobby agreed once more.

  “You can’t think your finding his card or his wanting to see Mr. Brown mean anything,” declared Olive.

  “Of course not,” said Bobby, still agreeing.

  “Well, then,” said Olive.

  “Quite so,” said Bobby. “But I’ll have to ask him when he saw Brown last and where. Only to check up on Brown’s movements,” Bobby explained; and Olive looked at him suspiciously and said no more, except to remark that it was time to go to bed.

  Bobby agreed to that proposition, too, and as he was winding up the clock in preparation for departure upstairs, he said slowly:

  “The two young men newcomers, Kayes and the other one. The two girls, Miss Foote and Miss Jebb. Miss Foote’s employer, Mr. Goodman. The two preachers, Mr. Childs and Duke Dell. A sort of closed circle with Brown for centre, and all connected with each other in one way or another. The murderer’s there all right, only which one—and why? And does the motive lie in Brown’s gold or in Brown’s religion—or both? Or neither?”

  He found himself thinking how curiously gold and religion seemed to run together through it all; those two tangled, twisted, crimson threads that run side by side all through the strange and tragic history of man. Most strangely fascinating did it seem to him how in this way this case seemed like an epitome of all recorded history. But when Olive asked him what he had in his mind now, and why he had stopped in the middle of winding up the clock, all he said was that he was sleepy.

  So Olive said she was, too, and they both proved the point by hardly stirring till morning when the tinkling phone informed them that Mr. Spencer was missing, and would the deputy chief please come at once and take over, as the speaker, the elderly Oldfordham sergeant and Mr. Spencer’s chief assistant, simply hadn’t the remotest idea what to do about it.

  CHAPTER XIII

  SEARCH AND FIND

  A development as surprising as disturbing, Bobby thought, as he made hasty preparations for departure in obedience to a summons he felt to be urgent in the extreme. To him the Oldfordham chief constable had seemed solid, steady, workmanlike; the very last person likely to take risks or become involved in hasty or adventurous excursions.

  “I hope,” he said uneasily to Olive as he was starting off in his little Bayard Seven he still used for economy’s sake, though, naturally, a deputy chief was entitled to a much larger and more dignified vehicle; “I hope nothing serious has happened. I can’t imagine Spencer staying out all night if he could help it.”

  Bobby had already rung up his Midwych headquarters to warn them not to expect him that morning. Arriving at Oldfordham, he found a state of complete confusion, alarm, and even distress, for Spencer had been a well-liked chief. Nor was Sergeant Hicks, who had rung him up, able to give him any information beyond the bare fact that the Spencer family had retired for the night, leaving father and husband comfortably settled in an armchair and carpet slippers; for company, cigarettes, the evening paper, and a cup of cocoa, pale, ineffectual substitute for the pre-war glass of whisky and soda. When morning came, there were still the unread evening paper, neatly folded, the unsmoked cigarettes, the untasted cocoa, the unoccupied armchair and slippers, but no Mr. Spencer. His hat and a light overcoat had gone, his bed had not been slept in, the front door was unbolted, and that was all either a bewildered sergeant or a tearful and frightened family could say.

  Bobby reassured them as best he could, and promised, more cheerfully than his inner feelings justified, to do his best to have news for them soon. He ascertained that the arrival of no visitor had been heard, no knocking or ringing at the door, no sound of voices, no phone ring. The unread evening paper, the untasted cocoa and so on, suggested clearly that whatever had happened had been immediately after the rest of the family had retired and before Spencer himself had had time to settle down. Somewhere about half-past ten, therefore. That, of course, made it still less likely that any sound of voices or any knocking or ringing, either of the phone or of the door bell, could have passed unnoticed by the other inmates of the house.

  But any slight noises Spencer made in leaving, such as opening or closing a door, could very easily have escaped attention, or, if heard at the time, not remembered. Such sounds would have seemed merely preliminaries to settling down, probably caused by a glance outside to see if it was still raining or something like that.

  Bobby, therefore, standing in this room that seemed to him a somewhat odd compromise between a prim feminine taste and Spencer’s own hearty outdoor interests, felt the first problem he had to solve was what could possibly have induced a man who had made all preparations for a comfortable half hour before turning in, to abandon them and venture forth on a raw and inclement night.

  Clear, apparently, that no message or messenger could have reached him. Clear, equally, that whatever it was, had been entirely unexpected and had seemed urgent. All those comfortable preparations had not been abandoned without good cause. A secret tapping at the window, perhaps, and some startling communication whispered through the lifted sash? But Bobby had already noticed that beneath the window was a wide flower bed that showed no trace of footmark or other disturbance. Moreover, the house was built on a slope so that the window was raised several feet above the ground.

  Difficult to tell what had happened, Bobby told himself. He went to the window and stood there looking out. A fine view over the town, the river, the country beyond. ‘A Room with a View,’ Bobby reflected, remembering a celebrated novel he had once read with less appreciation than he knew it deserved. Could Spencer have seen anything out there that he had felt called for instant investigation? But it was dark. Nothing to be seen in darkness. Except, of course, a light. But why should a light have attracted any attention? In these last days of the European War the black-out regulations had been lifted, and a lighted window was no longer a hair-raising indiscretion. So, Bobby argued to himself, it must have been not the light itself, but something else about it, its degree, its locality, its growing or lessening intensity, that had seemed to require investigation. Growing or lessening intensity seemed unlikely. Degree of brightness was no longer of great importance. Locality, then? That seemed more probable. A light, then, seen where no light should be? But why not? And where? Bobby felt he might have narrowed down the problem but had, if anything, increased its difficulty. All the same, it did begin to seem as if Spencer had seen a light that for some reason had roused his suspicions. So he had slipped out quietly to discover what it meant, though, since probably it was nothing much, and he expected to be back before his cocoa had time to grow cold, he had not thought it worth while to disturb the rest of the family by telling them he was going out for a minute or two. Bobby turned to the Oldfordham sergeant with him.

  “What church is that, right in line? Is it St. Barnabas?” he asked.

  “That’s right, sir,” the sergeant answered.

  Up to now he had been watching Bobby with much admiration for such, apparently, profound and certainly silent concentration on the problem; but now he began to think that, perhaps, the deputy chief wasn’
t so hot after all. Why, there wasn’t a kid in all Oldfordham who didn’t know St. Barnabas.

  “Then those cottages that show up rather clearly to the left will be where Brown lived?” Bobby asked, all unconscious of the slump that had just taken place in his reputation.

  “That’s right, sir,” said the sergeant again, less and less impressed, since that, too, was a thing everyone knew.

  “Do you know who lives next door?” asked Bobby next, and this to the sergeant seemed not so much ignorance as irrelevance.

  What had Brown’s neighbours got to do with the guv’nor’s very worrying disappearance?

  “Well, sir, there ain’t none just now in a manner of speaking,” he explained. “Old Mrs. Harris lived one side but she’s that scared after what’s happened she’s gone off to stay with her married daughter in Midwych, for fear it might be her next.”

  “On the other side?” Bobby asked.

  “Been empty some time, sir,” the sergeant told him. “It was Bill Edwardes lived there but he went off to London three months ago or more to help with the bomb damage they make such a tale about, as if nobody nowhere else hadn’t had none, neither. Why, that bomb that as near as near did in Sam Wiggins and his home and missis, too, might as easy as not have been plump in the middle of Oldfordham and what about that?” asked the sergeant with a touch of gloomy triumph in his voice.